The Best Schools 2008

On May 20, the day of the override election, Sharon Jacobs stood outside the polls at Zervas Elementary School, urging her fellow Newtonites to raise their taxes. She had been into activist causes in her twenties—AIDS awareness, gay rights, etc.—but nothing lately had stoked her fire like this vote. She has a five-year-old son, Max, and a seven-year-old daughter, Sophie, and few things are more important than their education. So she stood out there, holding a wooden stick with three signs attached to it. The top was a standard blue and white "VOTE YES" placard, which like its "VOTE NO" counterpart had sprouted up on lawns across town. The next sign down was a construction paper and marker job by Max, who had drawn a blockish, authoritarian-looking figure in a familiar blue hat. Max had depicted a cop, Jacobs said, "because he knew that he'd lose 15 police officers if there's a no vote." Max, as you can tell, is very advanced. His equally precocious sister designed the third sign, which declared: "Please Vote Yes! I (HEART) BOOKS!" "Sophie is a bibliophile," Jacobs explained.

There are only so many places in this great country of ours where a parent might earnestly refer to her seven-year-old as a bibliophile, and Newton, God bless it, is one of them. Ever since the educational pioneer Horace Mann moved the country's first teacher training academy to town in 1848, Newton has been a magnet for the book-minded. And though school financing has changed over the years, the historical record suggests that Newtonites have always gotten carried away on the subject—even elevating it to a matter of eternal salvation. The story goes that Mann once burst into the office of his friend Josiah Quincy and cajoled the one-time mayor of Boston to give him the cash for his school by telling him that the highest seat in heaven was reserved for the man willing to make such a commitment to education. Quincy wrote the check on the spot.

Larry Zuckerman, a recently retired Newton teacher who's studied the local schools extensively, says Mann left behind protégés who made the city synonymous with educational excellence. That reputation drew hordes of families during the post–World War II suburban boom. "People had high aspirations for their kids," says Zuckerman, who holds a Ph.D. in education. While enrollment shot up 60 percent in the 1950s and early '60s, Newton's innovative administrators partnered with professors at the Harvard Graduate School of Education to develop trailblazing curricula. Meanwhile, Harvard education students regularly taught courses at city schools. "There were a lot of ideas coming in," Zuckerman says. All this inventiveness helped win the city over a half-million dollars in grant money to fuel robust new programs.

By 1964, Time magazine was reporting that Newton's youngsters read at a level two years ahead of the national average. The article fawningly painted the city as the "Island of Change" that would set "a pace for schools everywhere." Needless to say, such a complimentary feature in such a prominent magazine became a tremendous point of pride (one archivist in the Newton History Museum even dubs it "legendary"). Ever since, a culture of educational excellence has flourished in the city. The more that reputation grew, the more parents, teachers, and administrators all wanted to move there (this has, as residents are very aware, provided a nice boost to real estate value). Educational greatness is now seen as a birthright in Newton, something that sets it apart. Speaking at a meeting of Newton's board of aldermen last spring, Alderman Paul Coletti criticized the state's suggestion that the city cut some of North's programs to save space and money. "When they make their recommendation, what they're saying is we should be mediocre like everyone else," he boomed. "That's wrong."

Naturally, that air of entitlement extends to parents, who at times may invest themselves in their kids' education a bit too much. Jaclyn Biancuzzo, a mother of two Newton-schooled students and herself a North alumna, says that parents are constantly complaining to teachers, nitpicking over everything from lesson plans to homework assignments. "The parents are very, very involved in education in Newton," she says, "more so than anywhere else."

Given the prevailing mindset, is it any wonder that the mayor of such a city would lead the charge to build the perfect high school, no matter the cost? And is it any wonder that the city went along for the ride? Even though howls of outrage went up every time the building's cost did, few seemed interested in scrapping the project altogether. The school board and the aldermen signed off in 2004 and 2006, respectively, and in a January 2007 city referendum on the site plan, nearly 60 percent of voters backed moving ahead with the Gund design, then priced at $140 million. Even last May, with the price already scraping $200 million, the aldermen approved $56 million of additional funding.

This isn't what the educational forefathers of the 1960s would have envisioned. Though the city had just sunk $19 million into new buildings when the Time article was written, the focus was still on classroom learning. "What makes Newton different," the story noted, "is its refusal to mistake physical growth for educational progress."